The Sweet Cheat Gone, by Marcel Proust

Chapter Four — A Fresh Light Upon Robert De
Saint-Loup

“Oh, it is unheard-of,” said my mother. “Listen, at my
age, one has ceased to be astonished at anything, but I
assure you that there could be nothing more unexpected than
what I find in this letter.” “Listen, first, to me,” I
replied, “I don’t know what it is, but however astonishing
it may be, it cannot be quite so astonishing as what I have
found in my letter. It is a marriage. It is Robert de
Saint-Loup who is marrying Gilberte Swann.” “Ah!” said my
mother, “then that is no doubt what is in the other letter,
which I have not yet opened, for I recognised your friend’s
hand.” And my mother smiled at me with that faint trace of
emotion which, ever since she had lost her own mother, she
felt at every event however insignificant, that concerned
human creatures who were capable of grief, of memory, and
who themselves also mourned their dead. And so my mother
smiled at me and spoke to me in a gentle voice, as though
she had been afraid, were she to treat this marriage
lightly, of belittling the melancholy feelings that it
might arouse in Swann’s widow and daughter, in Robert’s
mother who had resigned herself to parting from her son,
all of whom my mother, in her kindness of heart, in her
gratitude for their kindness to me, endowed with her own
faculty of filial, conjugal and maternal emotion. “Was I
right in telling you that you would find nothing more
astonishing?” I asked her. “On the contrary!” she replied
in a gentle tone, “it is I who can impart the most
extraordinary news, I shall not say the greatest, the
smallest, for that quotation from Sévigné which everyone
makes who knows nothing else that she ever wrote used to
distress your grandmother as much as ‘what a charming thing
it is to smoke.’ We scorn to pick up such stereotyped
Sévigné. This letter is to announce the marriage of the
Cambremer boy.” “Oh!” I remarked with indifference, “to
whom? But in any case the personality of the bridegroom
robs this marriage of any sensational element.” “Unless the
bride’s personality supplies it.” “And who is the bride in
question?” “Ah, if I tell you straight away, that will
spoil everything; see if you can guess,” said my mother
who, seeing that we had not yet reached Turin, wished to
keep something in reserve for me as meat and drink for the
rest of the journey. “But how do you expect me to know? Is
it anyone brilliant? If Legrandin and his sister are
satisfied, we may be sure that it is a brilliant marriage.”
“As for Legrandin, I cannot say, but the person who informs
me of the marriage says that Mme. de Cambremer is
delighted. I don’t know whether you will call it a
brilliant marriage. To my mind, it suggests the days when
kings used to marry shepherdesses, though in this case the
shepherdess is even humbler than a shepherdess, charming as
she is. It would have stupefied your grandmother, but would
not have shocked her.” “But who in the world is this
bride?” “It is Mlle. d’Oloron.” “That sounds to me
tremendous and not in the least shepherdessy, but I don’t
quite gather who she can be. It is a title that used to be
in the Guermantes family.” “Precisely, and M. de Charlus
conferred it, when he adopted her, upon Jupien’s niece.”
“Jupien’s niece! It isn’t possible!” “It is the reward of
virtue. It is a marriage from the last chapter of one of
Mme. Sand’s novels,” said my mother. “It is the reward of
vice, it is a marriage from the end of a Balzac novel,”
thought I. “After all,” I said to my mother, “when you come
to think of it, it is quite natural. Here are the
Cambremers established in that Guermantes clan among which
they never hoped to pitch their tent; what is more, the
girl, adopted by M. de Charlus, will have plenty of money,
which was indispensable now that the Cambremers have lost
theirs; and after all she is the adopted daughter, and, in
the Cambremers’ eyes, probably the real daughter — the
natural daughter — of a person whom they regard as a Prince
of the Blood Royal. A bastard of a semi-royal house has
always been regarded as a flattering alliance by the
nobility of France and other countries. Indeed, without
going so far back, only the other day, not more than six
months ago, don’t you remember, the marriage of Robert’s
friend and that girl, the only possible justification of
which was that she was supposed, rightly or wrongly, to be
the natural daughter of a sovereign prince.” My mother,
without abandoning the caste system of Combray which meant
that my grandmother would have been scandalised by such a
marriage, being principally anxious to echo her mother’s
judgment, added: “Anyhow, the girl is worth her weight in
gold, and your dear grandmother would not have had to draw
upon her immense goodness, her unbounded indulgence, to
keep her from condemning young Cambremer’s choice. Do you
remember how distinguished she thought the girl, years ago,
one day when she went into the shop to have a stitch put in
her skirt? She was only a child then. And now, even if she
has rather run to seed, and become an old maid, she is a
different woman, a thousand times more perfect. But your
grandmother saw all that at a glance. She found the little
niece of a jobbing tailor more ‘noble’ than the Duc de
Guermantes.” But even more necessary than to extol my
grandmother was it for my mother to decide that it was
‘better’ for her that she had not lived to see the day.
This was the supreme triumph of her filial devotion, as
though she were sparing my grandmother a final grief. “And
yet, can you imagine for a moment,” my mother said to me,
“what old father Swann — not that you ever knew him, of
course — would have felt if he could have known that he
would one day have a great-grandchild in whose veins the
blood of mother Moser who used to say: ‘Ponchour Mezieurs’
would mingle with the blood of the Duc de Guise!” “But
listen, Mamma, it is a great deal more surprising than
that. For the Swanns were very respectable people, and,
given the position that their son occupied, his daughter,
if he himself had made a decent marriage, might have
married very well indeed. But all her chances were ruined
by his marrying a courtesan.” “Oh, a courtesan, you know,
people were perhaps rather hard on her, I never quite
believed.” “Yes, a courtesan, indeed I can let you have
some startling revelations one of these days.” Lost in
meditation, my mother said: “The daughter of a woman to
whom your father would never allow me to bow marrying the
nephew of Mme. de Villeparisis, upon whom your father
wouldn’t allow me to call at first because he thought her
too grand for me!” Then: “The son of Mme. de Cambremer to
whom Legrandin was so afraid of having to give us a letter
of introduction because he didn’t think us smart enough,
marrying the niece of a man who would never dare to come to
our flat except by the service stairs! . . . All
the same your poor grandmother was right — you remember —
when she said that the great nobility could do things that
would shock the middle classes and that Queen Marie-Amélie
was spoiled for her by the overtures that she made to the
Prince de Condé‘s mistress to persuade him to leave his
fortune to the Due d’Aumale. You remember too, it shocked
her that for centuries past daughters of the House of
Gramont who have been perfect saints have borne the name
Corisande in memory of Henri IV’s connexion with one of
their ancestresses. These are things that may happen also,
perhaps, among the middle classes, but we conceal them
better. Can’t you imagine how it would have amused her,
your poor grandmother?” said Mamma sadly, for the joys of
which it grieved us to think that my grandmother was
deprived were the simplest joys of life, a tale, a play,
something more trifling still, a piece of mimicry, which
would have amused her, “Can’t you imagine her astonishment?
I am sure, however, that your grandmother would have been
shocked by these marriages, that they would have grieved
her, I feel that it is better that she never knew about
them,” my mother went on, for, when confronted with any
event, she liked to think that my grandmother would have
received a unique impression of it which would have been
caused by the marvellous singularity of her nature and had
an extraordinary importance. Did anything painful occur,
which could not have been foreseen in the past, the
disgrace or ruin of one of our old friends, some public
calamity, an epidemic, a war, a revolution, my mother would
say to herself that perhaps it was better that Grandmamma
had known nothing about it, that it would have distressed
her too keenly, that perhaps she would not have been able
to endure it. And when it was a question of something
startling like this, my mother, by an impulse directly
opposite to that of the malicious people who like to
imagine that others whom they do not like have suffered
more than is generally supposed, would not, in her
affection for my grandmother, allow that anything sad, or
depressing, could ever have happened to her. She always
imagined my grandmother as raised above the assaults even
of any malady which ought not to have developed, and told
herself that my grandmother’s death had perhaps been a good
thing on the whole, inasmuch as it had shut off the too
ugly spectacle of the present day from that noble character
which could never have become resigned to it. For optimism
is the philosophy of the past. The events that have
occurred being, among all those that were possible, the
only ones which we have known, the harm that they have
caused seems to us inevitable, and, for the slight amount
of good that they could not help bringing with them, it is
to them that we give the credit, imagining that without
them it would not have occurred. But she sought at the same
time to form a more accurate idea of what my grandmother
would have felt when she learned these tidings, and to
believe that it was impossible for our minds, less exalted
than hers, to form any such idea. “Can’t you imagine,” my
mother said to me first of all, “how astonished your poor
grandmother would have been!” And I felt that my mother was
pained by her inability to tell her the news, regretted
that my grandmother could not learn it, and felt it to be
somehow unjust that the course of life should bring to
light facts which my grandmother would never have believed,
rendering thus retrospectively the knowledge which my
grandmother had taken with her of people and society false,
and incomplete, the marriage of the Jupien girl and
Legrandin’s nephew being calculated to modify my
grandmother’s general ideas of life, no less than the news
— had my mother been able to convey it to her — that people
had succeeded in solving the problems, which my grandmother
had regarded as insoluble, of aerial navigation and
wireless telegraphy.

The train reached Paris before my mother and I had
finished discussing these two pieces of news which, so that
the journey might not seem to me too long, she had
deliberately reserved for the latter part of it, not
mentioning them until we had passed Milan. And my mother
continued the discussion after we had reached home: “Just
imagine, that poor Swann who was so anxious that his
Gilberte should be received by the Guermantes, how happy he
would be if he could see his daughter become a Guermantes!”
“Under another name, led to the altar as Mlle. de
Forcheville, do you think he would be so happy after all?”
“Ah, that is true. I had not thought of it. That is what
makes it impossible for me to congratulate the little chit,
the thought that she has had the heart to give up her
father’s name, when he was so good to her. — Yes, you are
right, when all is said and done, it is perhaps just as
well that he knows nothing about it.” With the dead as with
the living, we cannot tell whether a thing would cause them
joy or sorrow. “It appears that the Saint-Loups are going
to live at Tansonville. Old father Swann, who was so
anxious to shew your poor grandfather his pond, could he
ever have dreamed that the Duc de Guermantes would see it
constantly, especially if he had known of his son’s
marriage? And you yourself who have talked so often to
Saint-Loup about the pink hawthorns and lilacs and irises
at Tansonville, he will understand you better. They will be
his property.” Thus there developed in our dining-room, in
the lamplight that is so congenial to them, one of those
talks in which the wisdom not of nations but of families,
taking hold of some event, a death, a betrothal, an
inheritance, a bankruptcy, and slipping it under the
magnifying glass of memory, brings it into high relief,
detaches, thrusts back one surface of it, and places in
perspective at different points in space and time what, to
those who have not lived through the period in question,
seems to be amalgamated upon a single surface, the names of
dead people, successive addresses, the origins and changes
of fortunes, transmissions of property. Is not this wisdom
inspired by the Muse whom it is best to ignore for as long
as possible, if we wish to retain any freshness of
impressions, any creative power, but whom even those people
who have ignored her meet in the evening of their life in
the nave of the old country church, at the hour when all of
a sudden they feel that they are less moved by eternal
beauty as expressed in the carvings of the altar than by
the thought of the vicissitudes of fortune which those
carvings have undergone, passing into a famous private
collection, to a chapel, from there to a museum, then
returning at length to the church, or by the feeling as
they tread upon a marble slab that is almost endowed with
thought, that it covers the last remains of Arnault or
Pascal, or simply by deciphering (forming perhaps a mental
picture of a fair young worshipper) on the brass plate of
the wooden prayer-desk, the names of the daughters of
country squire or leading citizen? The Muse who has
gathered up everything that the more exalted Muses of
philosophy and art have rejected, everything that is not
founded upon truth, everything that is merely contingent,
but that reveals other laws as well, is History.

What I was to learn later on — for I had been unable to
keep in touch with all this affair from Venice — was that
Mlle. de Forcheville’s hand had been sought first of all by
the Prince de Silistrie, while Saint-Loup was seeking to
marry Mlle. d’Entragues, the Duc de Luxembourg’s daughter.
This is what had occurred. Mlle. de Forcheville possessing
a hundred million francs, Mme. de Marsantes had decided
that she would be an excellent match for her son. She made
the mistake of saying that the girl was charming, that she
herself had not the slightest idea whether she was rich or
poor, that she did not wish to know, but that even without
a penny it would be a piece of good luck for the most
exacting of young men to find such a wife. This was going
rather too far for a woman who was tempted only by the
hundred millions, which blinded her eyes to everything
else. At once it was understood that she was thinking of
the girl for her own son. The Princesse de Silistrie went
about uttering loud cries, expatiated upon the social
importance of Saint-Loup, and proclaimed that if he should
marry Odette’s daughter by a Jew then there was no longer a
Faubourg Saint-Germain. Mme. de Marsantes, sure of herself
as she was, dared not advance farther and retreated before
the cries of the Princesse de Silistrie, who immediately
made a proposal in the name of her own son. She had
protested only in order to keep Gilberte for herself.
Meanwhile Mme. de Marsantes, refusing to own herself
defeated, had turned at once to Mlle. d’Entragues, the Duc
de Luxembourg’s daughter. Having no more than twenty
millions, she suited her purpose less, but Mme. de
Marsantes told everyone that a Saint-Loup could not marry a
Mlle. Swann (there was no longer any mention of
Forcheville). Some time later, somebody having carelessly
observed that the Duc de Châtellerault was thinking of
marrying Mlle. d’Entragues, Mme. de Marsantes who was the
most captious woman in the world mounted her high horse,
changed her tactics, returned to Gilberte, made a formal
offer of marriage on Saint-Loup’s behalf, and the
engagement was immediately announced. This engagement
provoked keen comment in the most different spheres. Some
old friends of my mother, who belonged more or less to
Combray, came to see her to discuss Gilberte’s marriage,
which did not dazzle them in the least. “You know who Mlle.
de Forcheville is, she is simply Mlle. Swann. And her
witness at the marriage, the ‘Baron’ de Charlus, as he
calls himself, is the old man who used to keep her mother
at one time, under Swann’s very nose, and no doubt to his
advantage.” “But what do you mean?” my mother protested.
“In the first place, Swann was extremely rich.” “We must
assume that he was not as rich as all that if he needed
other people’s money. But what is there in the woman, that
she keeps her old lovers like that? She has managed to
persuade the third to marry her and she drags out the
second when he has one foot in the grave to make him act at
the marriage of the daughter she had by the first or by
some one else, for how is one to tell who the father was?
She can’t be certain herself! I said the third, it is the
three hundredth I should have said. But then, don’t you
know, if she’s no more a Forcheville than you or I, that
puts her on the same level as the bridegroom who of course
isn’t noble at all. Only an adventurer would marry a girl
like that. It appears he’s just a plain Monsieur Dupont or
Durand or something. If it weren’t that we have a Radical
mayor now at Combray, who doesn’t even lift his hat to the
priest, I should know all about it. Because, you
understand, when they published the banns, they were
obliged to give the real name. It is all very nice for the
newspapers or for the stationer who sends out the
intimations, to describe yourself as the Marquis de
Saint-Loup. That does no harm to anyone, and if it can give
any pleasure to those worthy people, I should be the last
person in the world to object! What harm can it do me? As I
shall never dream of going to call upon the daughter of a
woman who has let herself be talked about, she can have a
string of titles as long as my arm before her servants. But
in an official document it’s not the same thing. Ah, if my
cousin Sazerat were still deputy-mayor, I should have
written to him, and he would certainly have let me know
what name the man was registered under.”

Other friends of my mother who had met Saint-Loup in our
house came to her ‘day,’ and inquired whether the
bridegroom was indeed the same person as my friend. Certain
people went so far as to maintain, with regard to the other
marriage, that it had nothing to do with the Legrandin
Cambremers. They had this on good authority, for the
Marquise, née Legrandin, had contradicted the
rumour on the very eve of the day on which the engagement
was announced. I, for my part, asked myself why M. de
Charlus on the one hand, Saint-Loup on the other, each of
whom had had occasion to write to me quite recently, had
made various friendly plans and proposed expeditions, which
must inevitably have clashed with the wedding ceremonies,
and had said nothing whatever to me about these. I came to
the conclusion, forgetting the secrecy which people always
preserve until the last moment in affairs of this sort,
that I was less their friend than I had supposed, a
conclusion which, so far as Saint-Loup was concerned,
distressed me. Though why, when I had already remarked that
the affability, the ‘one-man-to-another’ attitude of the
aristocracy was all a sham, should I be surprised to find
myself its victim? In the establishment for women — where
men were now to be procured in increasing numbers — in
which M. de Charlus had surprised Morel, and in which the
‘assistant matron,’ a great reader of the Gaulois,
used to discuss the social gossip with her clients, this
lady, while conversing with a stout gentleman who used to
come to her incessantly to drink champagne with young men,
because, being already very stout, he wished to become
obese enough to be certain of not being ‘called up,’ should
there ever be a war, declared: “It seems, young Saint-Loup
is ‘one of those’ and young Cambremer too. Poor wives! — In
any case, if you know the bridegrooms, you must send them
to us, they will find everything they want here, and
there’s plenty of money to be made out of them.” Whereupon
the stout gentleman, albeit he was himself ‘one of those,’
protested, replied, being something of a snob, that he
often met Cambremer and Saint-Loup at his cousins’ the
Ardouvillers, and that they were great womanisers, and
quite the opposite of ‘all that.’ “Ah!” the assistant
matron concluded in a sceptical tone, but without any proof
of the assertion, and convinced that in our generation the
perversity of morals was rivalled only by the absurd
exaggeration of slanderous rumours. Certain people whom I
no longer saw wrote to me and asked me ‘what I thought’ of
these two marriages, precisely as though they had been
inviting a public discussion of the height of women’s hats
in the theatre or the psychological novel. I had not the
heart to answer these letters. Of these two marriages, I
thought nothing at all, but I did feel an immense
melancholy, as when two parts of our past existence, which
have been anchored near to us, and upon which we have
perhaps been basing idly from day to day an unacknowledged
hope, remove themselves finally, with a joyous crackling of
flames, for unknown destinations, like two vessels on the
high seas. As for the prospective bridegrooms themselves,
they regarded their own marriages from a point of view that
was quite natural, since it was a question not of other
people but of themselves. They had never tired of mocking
at such ‘grand marriages’ founded upon some secret shame.
And indeed the Cambremer family, so ancient in its lineage
and so modest in its pretensions, would have been the first
to forget Jupien and to remember only the unimaginable
grandeur of the House of Oloron, had not an exception
occurred in the person who ought to have been most
gratified by this marriage, the Marquise de
Cambremer-Legrandin. For, being of a malicious nature, she
reckoned the pleasure of humiliating her family above that
of glorifying herself. And so, as she had no affection for
her son, and was not long in taking a dislike to her
daughter-in-law, she declared that it was calamity for a
Cambremer to marry a person who had sprung from heaven knew
where, and had such bad teeth. As for young Cambremer, who
had already shewn a certain tendency to frequent the
society of literary people, we may well imagine that so
brilliant an alliance had not the effect of making him more
of a snob than before, but that feeling himself to have
become the successor of the Ducs d’Oloron —‘sovereign
princes’ as the newspapers said — he was sufficiently
persuaded of his own importance to be able to mix with the
very humblest people. And he deserted the minor nobility
for the intelligent bourgeoisie on the days when he did not
confine himself to royalty. The notices in the papers,
especially when they referred to Saint-Loup, invested my
friend, whose royal ancestors were enumerated, in a fresh
importance, which however could only depress me — as though
he had become some one else, the descendant of Robert the
Strong, rather than the friend who, only a little while
since, had taken the back seat in the carriage in order
that I might be more comfortable in the other; the fact
that I had had no previous suspicion of his marriage with
Gilberte, the prospect of which had been revealed to me
suddenly in a letter, so different from anything that I
could have expected of either him or her the day before,
and the fact that he had not let me know pained me, whereas
I ought to have reflected that he had had a great many
other things to do, and that moreover in the fashionable
world marriages are often arranged like this all of a
sudden, generally as a substitute for a different
combination which has come to grief — unexpectedly — like a
chemical precipitation. And the feeling of sadness, as
depressing as a household removal, as bitter as jealousy,
that these marriages caused me by the accident of their
sudden impact was so profound, that later on people used to
remind me of it, paying absurd compliments to my
perspicacity, as having been just the opposite of what it
was at the time, a twofold, nay a threefold and fourfold
presentiment.

The people in society who had taken no notice of
Gilberte said to me with an air of serious interest: “Ah!
It is she who is marrying the Marquis de Saint-Loup” and
studied her with the attentive gaze of people who not
merely relish all the social gossip of Paris but are
anxious to learn, and believe in the profundity of their
own introspection. Those who on the other hand had known
Gilberte alone gazed at Saint-Loup with the closest
attention, asked me (these were often people who barely
knew me) to introduce them and returned from their
presentation to the bridegroom radiant with the bliss of
fatuity, saying to me: “He is very nice looking.” Gilberte
was convinced that the name ‘Marquis de Saint-Loup’ was a
thousand times more important than ‘Duc d’Orléans.’

“It appears that it is the Princesse de Parme who
arranged young Cambremer’s marriage,” Mamma told me. And
this was true. The Princess had known for a long time, on
the one hand, by his works, Legrandin whom she regarded as
a distinguished man, on the other hand Mme. de Cambremer
who changed the conversation whenever the Princess asked
her whether she was not Legrandin’s sister. The Princess
knew how keenly Mme. de Cambremer felt her position on the
doorstep of the great aristocratic world, in which she was
invited nowhere. When the Princesse de Parme, who had
undertaken to find a husband for Mlle. d’Oloron, asked M.
de Charlus whether he had ever heard of a pleasant,
educated man who called himself Legrandin de Méséglise
(thus it was that M. Legrandin now styled himself), the
Baron first of all replied in the negative, then suddenly a
memory occurred to him of a man whose acquaintance he had
made in the train, one night, and who had given him his
card. He smiled a vague smile. “It is perhaps the same
person,” he said to himself. When he discovered that the
prospective bridegroom was the son of Legrandin’s sister,
he said: “Why, that would be really extraordinary! If he
takes after his uncle, after all, that would not alarm me,
I have always said that they make the best husbands.” “Who
are they?” inquired the Princess. “Oh, Ma’am, I could
explain it all to you if we met more often. With you one
can talk freely. Your Highness is so intelligent,” said
Charlus, seized by a desire to confide in some one which,
however, went no farther. The name Cambremer appealed to
him, although he did not like the boy’s parents, but he
knew that it was one of the four Baronies of Brittany and
the best that he could possibly hope for his adopted
daughter; it was an old and respected name, with solid
connexions in its native province. A Prince would have been
out of the question and, moreover, not altogether
desirable. This was the very thing. The Princess then
invited Legrandin to call. In appearance he had
considerably altered, and, of late, distinctly to his
advantage. Like those women who deliberately sacrifice
their faces to the slimness of their figures and never stir
from Marienbad, Legrandin had acquired the free and easy
air of a cavalry officer. In proportion as M. de Charlus
had grown coarse and slow, Legrandin had become slimmer and
moved more rapidly, the contrary effect of an identical
cause. This velocity of movement had its psychological
reasons as well. He was in the habit of frequenting certain
low haunts where he did not wish to be seen going in or
coming out: he would hurl himself into them. Legrandin had
taken up tennis at the age of fifty-five. When the
Princesse de Parme spoke to him of the Guermantes, of
Saint-Loup, he declared that he had known them all his
life, making a sort of composition of the fact of his
having always known by name the proprietors of Guermantes
and that of his having met, at my aunt’s house, Swann, the
father of the future Mme. de Saint-Loup, Swann upon whose
wife and daughter Legrandin, at Combray, had always refused
to call. “Indeed, I travelled quite recently with the
brother of the Duc de Guermantes, M. de Charlus. He began
the conversation spontaneously, which is always a good
sign, for it proves that a man is neither a tongue-tied
lout nor stuck-up. Oh, I know all the things that people
say about him. But I never pay any attention to gossip of
that sort. Besides, the private life of other people does
not concern me. He gave me the impression of a sensitive
nature, and a cultivated mind.” Then the Princesse de Parme
spoke of Mlle. d’Oloron. In the Guermantes circle people
were moved by the nobility of heart of M. de Charlus who,
generous as he had always been, was securing the future
happiness of a penniless but charming girl. And the Duc de
Guermantes, who suffered from his brother’s reputation, let
it be understood that, fine as this conduct was, it was
wholly natural. “I don’t know if I make myself clear,
everything in the affair is natural,” he said, speaking
ineptly by force of habit. But his object was to indicate
that the girl was a daughter of his brother whom the latter
was acknowledging. This accounted at the same time for
Jupien. The Princesse de Parme hinted at this version of
the story to shew Legrandin that after all young Cambremer
would be marrying something in the nature of Mlle. de
Nantes, one of those bastards of Louis XIV who were not
scorned either by the Duc d’Orléans or by the Prince de
Conti. These two marriages which I had already begun to
discuss with my mother in the train that brought us back to
Paris had quite remarkable effects upon several of the
characters who have figured in the course of this
narrative. First of all upon Legrandin; needless to say
that he swept like a hurricane into M. de Charlus’s town
house for all the world as though he were entering a house
of ill-fame where he must on no account be seen, and also,
at the same time, to display his activity and to conceal
his age — for our habits accompany us even into places
where they are no longer of any use to us — and scarcely
anybody observed that when M. de Charlus greeted him he did
so with a smile which it was hard to intercept, harder
still to interpret; this smile was similar in appearance,
and in its essentials was diametrically opposite to the
smile which two men, who are in the habit of meeting in
good society, exchange if they happen to meet in what they
regard as disreputable surroundings (such as the Elysée
where General de Froberville, whenever, in days past, he
met Swann there, would assume, on catching sight of him, an
expression of ironical and mysterious complicity
appropriate between two frequenters of the drawing-room of
the Princesse des Laumes who were compromising themselves
by visiting M. Grevy). Legrandin had been cultivating
obscurely for a long time past — ever since the days when I
used to go as a child to spend my holidays at Combray —
relations with the aristocracy, productive at the most of
an isolated invitation to a sterile house party. All of a
sudden, his nephew’s marriage having intervened to join up
these scattered fragments, Legrandin stepped into a social
position which retroactively derived a sort of solidity
from his former relations with people who had known him
only as a private person but had known him well. Ladies to
whom people offered to introduce him informed them that for
the last twenty years he had stayed with them in the
country for a fortnight annually, and that it was he who
had given them the beautiful old barometer in the small
drawing-room. It so happened that he had been photographed
in ‘groups’ which included Dukes who were related to them.
But as soon as he had acquired this social position, he
ceased to make any use of it. This was not merely because,
now that people knew him to be received everywhere, he no
longer derived any pleasure from being invited, it was
because, of the two vices that had long struggled for the
mastery of him, the less natural, snobbishness, yielded its
place to another that was less artificial, since it did at
least shew a sort of return, albeit circuitous, towards
nature. No doubt the two are not incompatible, and a
nocturnal tour of exploration of a slum may be made
immediately upon leaving a Duchess’s party. But the
chilling effect of age made Legrandin reluctant to
accumulate such an abundance of pleasures, to stir out of
doors except with a definite purpose, and had also the
effect that the pleasures of nature became more or less
platonic, consisting chiefly in friendships, in
conversations which took up time, and made him spend almost
all his own among the lower orders, so that he had little
left for a social existence. Mme. de Cambremer herself
became almost indifferent to the friendly overtures of the
Duchesse de Guermantes. The latter, obliged to call upon
the Marquise, had noticed, as happens whenever we come to
see more of our fellow-creatures, that is to say
combinations of good qualities which we end by discovering
with defects to which we end by growing accustomed, that
Mme. de Cambremer was a woman endowed with an innate
intelligence and an acquired culture of which for my part I
thought but little, but which appeared remarkable to the
Duchess. And so she often came, late in the afternoon, to
see Mme. de Cambremer and paid her long visits. But the
marvellous charm which her hostess imagined as existing in
the Duchesse de Guermantes vanished as soon as she saw that
the other sought her company, and she received her rather
out of politeness than for her own pleasure. A more
striking change was manifest in Gilberte, a change at once
symmetrical with and different from that which had occurred
in Swann after his marriage. It is true that during the
first few months Gilberte had been glad to open her doors
to the most select company. It was doubtless only with a
view to an eventual inheritance that she invited the
intimate friends to whom her mother was attached, but on
certain days only when there was no one but themselves,
secluded apart from the fashionable people, as though the
contact of Mme. Bontemps or Mme. Cottard with the Princesse
de Guermantes or the Princesse de Parme might, like that of
two unstable powders, have produced irreparable
catastrophes. Nevertheless the Bontemps, the Cottards and
such, although disappointed by the smallness of the party,
were proud of being able to say: “We were dining with the
Marquise de Saint-Loup,” all the more so as she ventured at
times so far as to invite, with them, Mme. de Marsantes,
who was emphatically the ‘great lady’ with a fan of
tortoise-shell and ostrich feathers, this again being a
piece of legacy-hunting. She only took care to pay from
time to time a tribute to the discreet people whom one
never sees except when they are invited, a warning with
which she bestowed upon her audience of the
Cottard-Bontemps class her most gracious and distant
greeting. Perhaps I should have preferred to be included in
these parties. But Gilberte, in whose eyes I was now
principally a friend of her husband and of the Guermantes
(and who — perhaps even in the Combray days, when my
parents did not call upon her mother — had, at the age when
we do not merely add this or that to the value of things
but classify them according to their species, endowed me
with that prestige which we never afterwards lose),
regarded these evenings as unworthy of me, and when I took
my leave of her would say: “It has been delightful to see
you, but come again the day after to-morrow, you will find
my aunt Guermantes, and Mme. de Poix; to-day I just had a
few of Mamma’s friends, to please Mamma.” But this state of
things lasted for a few months only, and very soon
everything was altered. Was this because Gilberte’s social
life was fated to exhibit the same contrasts as Swann’s?
However that may be, Gilberte had been only for a short
time Marquise de Saint-Loup (in the process of becoming, as
we shall see, Duchesse de Guermantes)† when, having
attained to the most brilliant and most difficult position,
she decided that the name Saint-Loup was now embodied in
herself like a glowing enamel and that, whoever her
associates might be, from now onwards she would remain for
all the world Marquise de Saint-Loup, wherein she was
mistaken, for the value of a title of nobility, like that
of shares in a company, rises with the demand and falls
when it is offered in the market.

† Translator’s footnote: This is quite
inexplicable. Gilberte reappears as Saint-Loup’s widow
while the Duc de Guermantes and his wife are still
alive.

Everything that seems to us imperishable tends to
destruction; a position in society, like anything else, is
not created once and for all time, but, just as much as the
power of an Empire, reconstructs itself at every moment by
a sort of perpetual process of creation, which explains the
apparent anomalies in social or political history in the
course of half a century. The creation of the world did not
occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day. The
Marquise de Saint-Loup said to herself, “I am the Marquise
de Saint-Loup,” she knew that, the day before, she had
refused three invitations to dine with Duchesses. But if,
to a certain extent, her name exalted the class of people,
as little aristocratic as possible, whom she entertained,
by an inverse process, the class of people whom the
Marquise entertained depreciated the name that she bore.
Nothing can hold out against such processes, the greatest
names succumb to them in the end. Had not Swann known a
Duchess of the House of France whose drawing-room, because
any Tom, Dick or Harry was welcomed there, had fallen to
the lowest rank? One day when the Princesse des Laumes had
gone from a sense of duty to call for a moment upon this
Highness, in whose drawing-room she had found only the most
ordinary people, arriving immediately afterwards at Mme.
Leroi’s, she had said to Swann and the Marquis de Modène:
“At last I find myself upon friendly soil. I have just come
from Mme. la Duchesse de X — there weren’t three faces I
knew in the room.” Sharing, in short, the opinion of the
character in the operetta who declares: “My name, I think,
dispenses me from saying more,” Gilberte set to work to
flaunt her contempt for what she had so ardently desired,
to proclaim that all the people in the Faubourg
Saint-Germain were idiots, people to whose houses one could
not go, and, suiting the action to the word, ceased to go
to them. People who did not make her acquaintance until
after this epoch, and who, in the first stages of that
acquaintance, heard her, by that time Duchesse de
Guermantes, make the most absurd fun of the world in which
she could so easily have moved, seeing that she never
invited a single person out of that world, and that if any
of them, even the most brilliant, ventured into her
drawing-room, she would yawn openly in their faces, blush
now in retrospect at the thought that they themselves could
ever have seen any claim to distinction in the fashionable
world, and would never dare to confess this humiliating
secret of their past weaknesses to a woman whom they
suppose to have been, owing to an essential loftiness of
her nature, incapable from her earliest moments of
understanding such things. They hear her poke such
delicious fun at Dukes, and see her (which is more
significant) make her behaviour accord so entirely with her
mockery! No doubt they do not think of inquiring into the
causes of the accident which turned Mlle. Swann into Mlle.
de Forcheville, Mlle. de Forcheville into the Marquise de
Saint-Loup, and finally into the Duchesse de Guermantes.
Possibly it does not occur to them either that the effects
of this accident would serve no less than its causes to
explain Gilberte’s subsequent attitude, the habit of mixing
with upstarts not being regarded quite in the same light in
which Mlle. Swann would have regarded it by a lady whom
everybody addresses as ‘Madame la Duchesse’ and the other
Duchesses who bore her as ‘cousin.’ We are always ready to
despise a goal which we have not succeeded in reaching, or
have permanently reached. And this contempt seems to us to
form part of the character of people whom we do not yet
know. Perhaps if we were able to retrace the course of past
years, we should find them devoured, more savagely than
anyone, by those same weaknesses which they have succeeded
so completely in concealing or conquering that we reckon
them incapable not only of having ever been attacked by
them themselves, but even of ever excusing them in other
people, let alone being capable of imagining them. Anyhow,
very soon the drawing-room of the new Marquise de
Saint-Loup assumed its permanent aspect, from the social
point of view at least, for we shall see what troubles were
brewing in it in another connexion; well, this aspect was
surprising for the following reason: people still
remembered that the most formal, the most exclusive parties
in Paris, as brilliant as those given by the Duchesse de
Guermantes, were those of Mme. de Marsantes, Saint-Loup’s
mother. On the other hand, in recent years, Odette’s
drawing-room, infinitely lower in the social scale, had
been no less dazzling in its elegance and splendour.
Saint-Loup, however, delighted to have, thanks to his
wife’s vast fortune, everything that he could desire in the
way of comfort, wished only to rest quietly in his armchair
after a good dinner with a musical entertainment by good
performers. And this young man who had seemed at one time
so proud, so ambitious, invited to share his luxury old
friends whom his mother would not have admitted to her
house. Gilberte, on her side, put into effect Swann’s
saying: “Quality doesn’t matter, what I dread is quantity.”
And Saint-Loup, always on his knees before his wife, and
because he loved her, and because it was to her that he
owed these extremes of comfort, took care not to interfere
with tastes that were so similar to his own. With the
result that the great receptions given by Mme. de Marsantes
and Mme. de Forcheville, given year after year with an eye
chiefly to the establishment, upon a brilliant footing, of
their children, gave rise to no reception by M. and Mme. de
Saint-Loup. They had the best of saddle-horses on which to
go out riding together, the finest of yachts in which to
cruise — but they never took more than a couple of guests
with them. In Paris, every evening, they would invite three
or four friends to dine, never more; with the result that,
by an unforeseen but at the same time quite natural
retrogression, the two vast maternal aviaries had been
replaced by a silent nest.

The person who profited least by these two marriages was
the young Mademoiselle d’Oloron who, already suffering from
typhoid fever on the day of the religious ceremony, was
barely able to crawl to the church and died a few weeks
later. The letter of intimation that was sent out some time
after her death blended with names such as Jupien’s those
of almost all the greatest families in Europe, such as the
Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Montmorency, H.R.H. the Comtesse
de Bourbon-Soissons, the Prince of Modena-Este, the
Vicomtesse d’Edumea, Lady Essex, and so forth. No doubt
even to a person who knew that the deceased was Jupien’s
niece, this plethora of grand connexions would not cause
any surprise. The great thing, after all, is to have grand
connexions. Then, the casus foederis coming into
play, the death of a simple little shop-girl plunges all
the princely families of Europe in mourning. But many young
men of a later generation, who were not familiar with the
facts, might, apart from the possibility of their mistaking
Marie-Antoinette d’Oloron, Marquise de Cambremer, for a
lady of the noblest birth, have been guilty of many other
errors when they read this communication. Thus, supposing
their excursions through France to have given them some
slight familiarity with the country round Combray, when
they saw that the Comte de Méséglise figured among the
first of the signatories, close to the Duc de Guermantes,
they might not have felt any surprise. “The Méséglise way,”
they might have said, “converges with the Guermantes way,
old and noble families of the same region may have been
allied for generations. Who knows? It is perhaps a branch
of the Guermantes family which bears the title of Comte de
Méséglise.” As it happened, the Comte de Méséglise had no
connexion with the Guermantes and was not even enrolled on
the Guermantes side, but on the Cambremer side, since the
Comte de Méséglise, who by a rapid advancement had been for
two years only Legrandin de Méséglise, was our old friend
Legrandin. No doubt, taking one false title with another,
there were few that could have been so disagreeable to the
Guermantes as this. They had been connected in the past
with the authentic Comtes de Méséglise, of whom there
survived only one female descendant, the daughter of
obscure and unassuming parents, married herself to one of
my aunt’s tenant fanners named Ménager, who had become rich
and bought Mirougrain from her and now styled himself
‘Ménager de Mirougrain,’ with the result that when you said
that his wife was born ‘de Méséglise’ people thought that
she must simply have been born at Méséglise and that she
was ‘of Méséglise’ as her husband was ‘of Mirougrain.’

Any other sham title would have caused less annoyance to
the Guermantes family. But the aristocracy knows how to
tolerate these irritations and many others as well, the
moment that a marriage which is deemed advantageous, from
whatever point of view, is in question. Shielded by the Duc
de Guermantes, Legrandin was, to part of that generation,
and will be to the whole of the generation that follows it,
the true Comte de Méséglise.

Yet another mistake which any young reader not
acquainted with the facts might have been led to make was
that of supposing that the Baron and Baronne de Forcheville
figured on the list in their capacity as parents-in-law of
the Marquis de Saint-Loup, that is to say on the Guermantes
side. But on this side, they had no right to appear since
it was Robert who was related to the Guermantes and not
Gilberte. No, the Baron and Baronne de Forcheville, despite
this misleading suggestion, did figure on the wife’s side,
it is true, and not on the Cambremer side, because not of
the Guermantes, but of Jupien, who, the reader must now be
told, was a cousin of Odette.

All M. de Charlus’s favour had been lavished since the
marriage of his adopted niece upon the young Marquis de
Cambremer; the young man’s tastes which were similar to
those of the Baron, since they had not prevented the Baron
from selecting him as a husband for Mlle. d’Oloron, made
him, as was only natural, appreciate him all the more when
he was left a widower. This is not to say that the Marquis
had not other qualities which made him a charming companion
for M. de Charlus. But even in the case of a man of real
merit, it is an advantage that is not disdained by the
person who admits him into his private life and one that
makes him particularly useful that he can also play whist.
The intelligence of the young Marquis was remarkable and as
they had already begun to say at Féterne when he was barely
out of his cradle, he ‘took’ entirely after his
grandmother, had the same enthusiasms, the same love of
music. He reproduced also some of her peculiarities, but
these more by imitation, like all the rest of the family,
than from atavism. Thus it was that, some time after the
death of his wife, having received a letter signed
‘Léonor,’ a name which I did not remember as being his, I
realised who it was that had written to me only when I had
read the closing formula: “Croyez à ma sympathie
vraie,” the word ‘vraie,’ coming in that
order, added to the Christian name Léonor the surname
Cambremer.

About this time I used to see a good deal of Gilberte
with whom I had renewed my old intimacy: for our life, in
the long run, is not calculated according to the duration
of our friendships. Let a certain period of time elapse and
you will see reappear (just as former Ministers reappear in
politics, as old plays are revived on the stage) friendly
relations that have been revived between the same persons
as before, after long years of interruption, and revived
with pleasure. After ten years, the reasons which made one
party love too passionately, the other unable to endure a
too exacting despotism, no longer exist. Convention alone
survives, and everything that Gilberte would have refused
me in the past, that had seemed to her intolerable,
impossible, she granted me quite readily — doubtless
because I no longer desired it. Although neither of us
avowed to himself the reason for this change, if she was
always ready to come to me, never in a hurry to leave me,
it was because the obstacle had vanished: my love.

I went, moreover, a little later to spend a few days at
Tansonville. The move I found rather a nuisance, for I was
keeping a girl in Paris who slept in the bachelor flat
which I had rented. As other people need the aroma of
forests or the ripple of a lake, so I needed her to sleep
near at hand during the night and by day to have her always
by my side in the carriage. For even if one love passes
into oblivion, it may determine the form of the love that
is to follow it. Already, in the heart even of the previous
love, daily habits existed, the origin of which we did not
ourselves recall. It was an anguish of a former day that
had made us think with longing, then adopt in a permanent
fashion, like customs the meaning of which has been
forgotten, those homeward drives to the beloved’s door, or
her residence in our home, our presence or the presence of
some one in whom we have confidence upon all her outings,
all these habits, like great uniform highroads along which
our love passes daily and which were forged long ago in the
volcanic fire of an ardent emotion. But these habits
survive the woman, survive even the memory of the woman.
They become the pattern, if not of all our loves, at least
of certain of our loves which alternate with the others.
And thus my home had demanded, in memory of a forgotten
Albertine, the presence of my mistress of the moment whom I
concealed from visitors and who filled my life as Albertine
had filled it in the past. And before I could go to
Tansonville I had to make her promise that she would place
herself in the hands of one of my friends who did not care
for women, for a few days.

I had heard that Gilberte was unhappy, betrayed by
Robert, but not in the fashion which everyone supposed,
which perhaps she herself still supposed, which in any case
she alleged. An opinion that was justified by self-esteem,
the desire to hoodwink other people, to hoodwink herself,
not to mention the imperfect knowledge of his infidelities
which is all that betrayed spouses ever acquire, all the
more so as Robert, a true nephew of M. de Charlus, went
about openly with women whom he compromised, whom the world
believed and whom Gilberte supposed more or less to be his
mistresses. It was even thought in society that he was too
barefaced, never stirring, at a party, from the side of
some woman whom he afterwards accompanied home, leaving
Mme. de Saint-Loup to return as best she might. Anyone who
had said that the other woman whom he compromised thus was
not really his mistress would have been regarded as a fool,
incapable of seeing what was staring him in the face, but I
had been pointed, alas, in the direction of the truth, a
truth which caused me infinite distress, by a few words let
fall by Jupien. What had been my amazement when, having
gone, a few months before my visit to Tansonville, to
inquire for M. de Charlus, in whom certain cardiac symptoms
had been causing his friends great anxiety, and having
mentioned to Jupien, whom I found by himself, some
love-letters addressed to Robert and signed Bobette which
Mme. de Saint-Loup had discovered, I learned from the
Baron’s former factotum that the person who used the
signature Bobette was none other than the violinist who had
played so important a part in the life of M. de Charlus.
Jupien could not speak of him without indignation: “The boy
was free to do what he chose. But if there was one
direction in which he ought never to have looked, that was
the Baron’s nephew. All the more so as the Baron loved his
nephew like his own son. He has tried to separate the young
couple, it is scandalous. And he must have gone about it
with the most devilish cunning, or no one was ever more
opposed to that sort of thing than the Marquis de
Saint-Loup. To think of all the mad things he has done for
his mistresses! No, that wretched musician may have
deserted the Baron as he did, by a mean trick, I don’t mind
saying; still, that was his business. But to take up with
the nephew, there are certain things that are not done.”
Jupien was sincere in his indignation; among people who are
styled immoral, moral indignation is quite as violent as
among other people, only its object is slightly different.
What is more, people whose own hearts are not directly
engaged, always regard unfortunate entanglements,
disastrous marriages as though we were free to choose the
inspiration of our love, and do not take into account the
exquisite mirage which love projects and which envelops so
entirely and so uniquely the person with whom we are in
love that the ‘folly’ with which a man is charged who
marries his cook or the mistress of his best friend is as a
rule the only poetical action that he performs in the
course of his existence.

I gathered that Robert and his wife had been on the
brink of a separation (albeit Gilberte had not yet
discovered the precise nature of the trouble) and that it
was Mme. de Marsantes, a loving, ambitious and
philosophical mother, who had arranged and enforced their
reconciliation. She moved in those circles in which the
inbreeding of incessantly crossed strains and a gradual
impoverishment bring to the surface at every moment in the
realm of the passions, as in that of pecuniary interest,
inherited vices and compromises. With the same energy with
which she had in the past protected Mme. Swann, she had
assisted the marriage of Jupien’s niece and brought about
that of her own son to Gilberte, employing thus on her own
account, with a pained resignation, the same primeval
wisdom which she dispensed throughout the Faubourg. And
perhaps what had made her at a certain moment expedite
Robert’s marriage to Gilberte — which had certainly caused
her less trouble and cost fewer tears than making him break
with Rachel — had been the fear of his forming with another
courtesan — or perhaps with the same one, for Robert took a
long time to forget Rachel — a fresh attachment which might
have been his salvation. Now I understood what Robert had
meant when he said to me at the Princesse de Guermantes’s:
“It is a pity that your young friend at Balbec has not the
fortune that my mother insists upon. I believe she and I
would have got on very well together.” He had meant that
she belonged to Gomorrah as he belonged to Sodom, or
perhaps, if he was not yet enrolled there, that he had
ceased to enjoy women whom he could not love in a certain
fashion and in the company of other women. Gilberte, too,
might be able to enlighten me as to Albertine. If then,
apart from rare moments of retrospect, I had not lost all
my curiosity as to the life of my dead mistress, I should
have been able to question not merely Gilberte but her
husband. And it was, after all, the same thing that had
made both Robert and myself anxious to marry Albertine (to
wit, the knowledge that she was a lover of women). But the
causes of our desire, like its objects for that matter,
were opposite. In my case, it was the desperation in which
I had been plunged by the discovery, in Robert’s the
satisfaction; in my case to prevent her, by perpetual
vigilance, from indulging her predilection; in Robert’s to
cultivate it, and by granting her her freedom to make her
bring her girl friends to him. If Jupien traced back to a
quite recent origin the fresh orientation, so divergent
from their original course, that Robert’s carnal desires
had assumed, a conversation which I had with Aimé and which
made me very miserable shewed me that the head waiter at
Balbec traced this divergence, this inversion to a far
earlier date. The occasion of this conversation had been my
going for a few days to Balbec, where Saint-Loup himself
had also come with his wife, whom during this first phase
he never allowed out of his sight. I had marvelled to see
how Rachel’s influence over Robert still made itself felt.
Only a young husband who has long been keeping a mistress
knows how to take off his wife’s cloak as they enter a
restaurant, how to treat her with befitting courtesy. He
has, during his illicit relations, learned all that a good
husband should know. Not far from him at a table adjoining
my own, Bloch among a party of pretentious young university
men, was assuming a false air of being at his ease and
shouted at the top of his voice to one of his friends, as
he ostentatiously passed him the bill of fare with a
gesture which upset two water-bottles: “No, no, my dear
man, order! Never in my life have I been able to make head
or tail of these documents. I have never known how to order
dinner!” he repeated with a pride that was hardly sincere
and, blending literature with gluttony, decided at once
upon a bottle of champagne which he liked to see ‘in a
purely symbolic fashion’ adorning a conversation.
Saint-Loup, on the other hand, did know how to order
dinner. He was seated by the side of Gilberte — already
pregnant (he was, in the years that followed, to keep her
continually supplied with offspring)† — as he would
presently lie down by her side in their double bed in the
hotel. He spoke to no one but his wife, the rest of the
hotel appeared not to exist for him, but at the moment when
a waiter came to take his order, and stood close beside
him, he swiftly raised his blue eyes and darted a glance at
him which did not last for more than two seconds, but in
its limpid penetration seemed to indicate a kind of
curiosity and investigation entirely different from that
which might have animated any ordinary diner studying, even
at greater length, a page or messenger, with a view to
making humorous or other observations which he would
communicate to his friends. This little quick glance,
apparently quite disinterested, revealed to those who had
intercepted it that this excellent husband, this once so
passionate lover of Rachel, possessed another plane in his
life, and one that seemed to him infinitely more
interesting than that upon which he moved from a sense of
duty. But it was to be discerned only in that glance.
Already his eyes had returned to Gilberte who had seen
nothing, he introduced a passing friend and left the room
to stroll with her outside. Now, Aimé was speaking to me at
that moment of a far earlier time, the time when I had made
Saint-Loup’s acquaintance, through Mme. de Villeparisis, at
this same Balbec. “Why, surely, Sir,” he said to me, “it is
common knowledge, I have known it for ever so long. The
year when Monsieur first came to Balbec, M. le Marquis shut
himself up with my lift-boy, on the excuse of developing
some photographs of Monsieur’s grandmother. The boy made a
complaint, we had the greatest difficulty in hushing the
matter up. And besides, Monsieur, Monsieur remembers the
day, no doubt, when he came to luncheon at the restaurant
with M. le Marquis de Saint-Loup and his mistress, whom M.
le Marquis was using as a screen. Monsieur doubtless
remembers that M. le Marquis left the room, pretending that
he had lost his temper. Of course I don’t suggest for a
moment that Madame was in the right. She was leading him a
regular dance. But as to that day, no one — will ever make
me believe that M. le Marquis’s anger wasn’t put on, and
that he hadn’t a good reason to get away from Monsieur and
Madame.” So far as this day was concerned, I am convinced
that, if Aimé was not lying consciously, he was entirely
mistaken. I remembered quite well the state Robert was in,
the blow he struck the journalist. And, for that matter, it
was the same with the Balbec incident; either the lift-boy
had lied, or it was Aimé who was lying. At least, I
supposed so; certainty I could not feel, for we never see
more than one aspect of things. Had it not been that the
thought distressed me, I should have found a refreshing
irony in the fact that, whereas to me sending the lift-boy
to Saint-Loup had been the most convenient way of conveying
a letter to him and receiving his answer, to him it had
meant making the acquaintance of a person who had taken his
fancy. Everything, indeed, is at least twofold. Upon the
most insignificant action that we perform, another man will
graft a series of entirely different actions; it is certain
that Saint-Loup’s adventure with the lift-boy, if it
occurred, no more seemed to me to be involved in the
commonplace dispatch of my letter than a man who knew
nothing of Wagner save the duet in Lohengrin would
be able to foresee the prelude to Tristan.
Certainly to men, things offer only a limited number of
their innumerable attributes, because of the paucity of our
senses. They are coloured because we have eyes, how many
other epithets would they not merit if we had hundreds of
senses? But this different aspect which they might present
is made more comprehensible to us by the occurrence in life
of even the most trivial event of which we know a part
which we suppose to be the whole, and at which another
person looks as though through a window opening upon
another side of the house and offering a different view.
Supposing that Aimé had not been mistaken, Saint-Loup’s
blush when Bloch spoke to him of the lift-boy had not,
perhaps, been due after all to my friend’s pronouncing the
word as ‘lighft.’ But I was convinced that Saint-Loup’s
physiological evolution had not begun at that period and
that he then had been still exclusively a lover of women.
More than by any other sign, I could tell this
retrospectively by the friendship that Saint-Loup had shewn
for myself at Balbec. It was only while he was in love with
women that he was really capable of friendship. Afterwards,
for some time at least, to the men who did not attract him
physically he displayed an indifference which was to some
extent, I believe, sincere — for he had become very curt —
and which he exaggerated as well in order to make people
think that he was interested only in women. But I remember
all the same that one day at Doncières, as I was on my way
to dine with the Verdurins, and after he had been gazing
rather markedly at Morel, he had said to me: “Curious, that
fellow, he reminds me in some ways of Rachel. Don’t you
notice the likeness? To my mind, they are identical in
certain respects. Not that it can make any difference to
me.” And nevertheless his eyes remained for a long time
gazing abstractedly at the horizon, as when we think,
before returning to the card-table or going out to dinner,
of one of those long voyages which we shall never make, but
for which we feel a momentary longing. But if Robert found
certain traces of Rachel in Charlie, Gilberte, for her
part, sought to present some similarity to Rachel, so as to
attract her husband, wore like her bows of scarlet or pink
or yellow ribbon in her hair, which she dressed in a
similar style, for she believed that her husband was still
in love with Rachel, and so was jealous of her. That
Robert’s love may have hovered at times over the boundary
which divides the love of a man for a woman from the love
of a man for a man was quite possible. In any case, the
part played by his memory of Rachel was now purely
aesthetic. It is indeed improbable that it could have
played any other part. One day Robert had gone to her to
ask her to dress up as a man, to leave a long tress of hair
hanging down, and nevertheless had contented himself with
gazing at her without satisfying his desire. He remained no
less attached to her than before and paid her scrupulously
but without any pleasure the enormous allowance that he had
promised her, not that this prevented her from treating him
in the most abominable fashion later on. This generosity
towards Rachel would not have distressed Gilberte if she
had known that it was merely the resigned fulfilment of a
promise which no longer bore any trace of love. But love
was, on the contrary, precisely what he pretended to feel
for Rachel. Homosexuals would be the best husbands in the
world if they did not make a show of being in love with
other women. Not that Gilberte made any complaint. It was
the thought that Robert had been loved, for years on end,
by Rachel that had made her desire him, had made her refuse
more eligible suitors; it seemed that he was making a sort
of concession to her when he married her. And indeed, at
first, any comparison between the two women (incomparable
as they were nevertheless in charm and beauty) did not
favour the delicious Gilberte. But the latter became
enhanced later on in her husband’s esteem whereas Rachel
grew visibly less important. There was another person who
contradicted herself: namely, Mme. Swann. If, in Gilberte’s
eyes, Robert before their marriage was already crowned with
the twofold halo which was created for him on the one hand
by his life with Rachel, perpetually proclaimed in Mme. de
Marsantes’s lamentations, on the other hand by the prestige
which the Guermantes family had always had in her father’s
eyes and which she had inherited from him, Mme. de
Forcheville would have preferred a more brilliant, perhaps
a princely marriage (there were royal families that were
impoverished and would have accepted the dowry — which, for
that matter, proved to be considerably less than the
promised millions — purged as it was by the name
Forcheville) and a son-in-law less depreciated in social
value by a life spent in comparative seclusion. She had not
been able to prevail over Gilberte’s determination, had
complained bitterly to all and sundry, denouncing her
son-in-law. One fine day she had changed her tune, the
son-in-law had become an angel, nothing was ever said
against him except in private. The fact was that age had
left unimpaired in Mme. Swann (become Mme. de Forcheville)
the need that she had always felt of financial support,
but, by the desertion of her admirers, had deprived her of
the means. She longed every day for another necklace, a new
dress studded with brilliants, a more sumptuous motor-car,
but she had only a small income, Forcheville having made
away with most of it, and — what Israelite strain
controlled Gilberte in this? — she had an adorable, but a
fearfully avaricious daughter, who counted every penny that
she gave her husband, not to mention her mother. Well, all
of a sudden she had discerned, and then found her natural
protector in Robert. That she was no longer in her first
youth mattered little to a son-in-law who was not a lover
of women. All that he asked of his mother-in-law was to
smooth down some little difficulty that had arisen between
Gilberte and himself, to obtain his wife’s consent to his
going for a holiday with Morel. Odette had lent her
services, and was at once rewarded with a magnificent ruby.
To pay for this, it was necessary that Gilberte should
treat her husband more generously. Odette preached this
doctrine to her with all the more fervour in that it was
she herself who would benefit by her daughter’s generosity.
Thus, thanks to Robert, she was enabled, on the threshold
of her fifties (some people said, of her sixties) to dazzle
every table at which she dined, every party at which she
appeared, with an unparalleled splendour without needing to
have, as in the past, a ‘friend’ who now would no longer
have stood for it, in other words have paid the piper. And
so she had entered finally, it appeared, into the period of
ultimate chastity, and yet she had never been so smart.

† Dis aliter visum. We shall see,
in the sequel, that the widowed Gilberte appears to be the
mother of an only daughter. C. K. S. M.]

It was not merely the malice, the rancour of the once
poor boy against the master who has enriched him and has
moreover (this was in keeping with the character and still
more with the vocabulary of M. de Charlus) made him feel
the difference of their positions, that had made Charlie
turn to Saint-Loup in order to add to the Baron’s sorrows.
He may also have had an eye to his own profit. I formed the
impression that Robert must be giving him a great deal of
money. After an evening party at which I had met Robert
before I went down to Combray, and where the manner in
which he displayed himself by the side of a lady of fashion
who was reputed to be his mistress, in which he attached
himself to her, never leaving her for a moment, enveloped
publicly in the folds of her skirt, made me think, but with
an additional nervous trepidation, of a sort of involuntary
rehearsal of an ancestral gesture which I had had an
opportunity of observing in M. de Charlus, when he appeared
to be robed in the finery of Mme. Molé or some other woman,
the banner of a gynaecophil cause which was not his own but
which he loved, albeit without having the right to flaunt
it thus, whether because he found it useful as a protection
or aesthetically charming, I had been struck, as we came
away, by the discovery that this young man, so generous
when he was far less rich, had become so stingy. That a man
clings only to what he possesses, and that he who used to
scatter money when he so rarely had any now hoards that
with which he is amply supplied, is no doubt a common
enough phenomenon, and yet in this instance it seemed to me
to have assumed a more individual form. Saint-Loup refused
to take a cab, and I saw that he had kept a tramway
transfer-ticket. No doubt in so doing Saint-Loup was
exercising, with a different object, talents which he had
acquired in the course of his intimacy with Rachel. A young
man who has lived for years with a woman is not as
inexperienced as the novice for whom the girl that he
marries is the first. Similarly, having had to enter into
the minutest details of Rachel’s domestic economy, partly
because she herself was useless as a housekeeper, and
afterwards because his jealousy made him determined to keep
a firm control over her private life, he was able, in the
administration of his wife’s property and the management of
their household, to continue playing the part with a skill
and experience which Gilberte would perhaps have lacked,
who gladly relinquished the duties to him. But no doubt he
was doing this principally in order to be able to support
Charlie with every penny saved by his cheeseparing,
maintaining him in affluence without Gilberte’s either
noticing or suffering by his peculations. Tears came to my
eyes when I reflected that I had felt in the past for a
different Saint-Loup an affection which had been so great
and which I could see quite well, from the cold and evasive
manner which he now adopted, that he no longer felt for me,
since men, now that they were capable of arousing his
desires, could no longer inspire his friendship. How could
these tastes have come to birth in a young man who had been
so passionate a lover of women that I had seen him brought
to a state of almost suicidal frenzy because ‘Rachel, when
from the Lord’ had threatened to leave him? Had the
resemblance between Charlie and Rachel — invisible to me —
been the plank which had enabled Robert to pass from his
father’s tastes to those of his uncle, in order to complete
the physiological evolution which even in that uncle had
occurred quite late in life? At times however Aimé‘s words
came back to my mind to make me uneasy; I remembered Robert
that year at Balbec; he had had a trick, when he spoke to
the lift-boy, of not paying any attention to him which
strongly resembled M. de Charlus’s manner when he addressed
certain men. But Robert might easily have derived this from
M. de Charlus, from a certain stiffness and a certain
bodily attitude proper to the Guermantes family, without
for a moment sharing the peculiar tastes of the Baron. For
instance, the Duc de Guermantes, who was free from any
taint of the sort, had the same nervous trick as M. de
Charlus of turning his wrist, as though he were
straightening a lace cuff round it, and also in his voice
certain shrill and affected intonations, mannerisms to all
of which, in M. de Charlus, one might have been tempted to
ascribe another meaning, to which he would have given
another meaning himself, the individual expressing his
peculiarities by means of impersonal and atavistic traits
which are perhaps nothing more than ingrained peculiarities
fixed in his gestures and voice. By this latter hypothesis,
which borders upon natural history, it would not be M. de
Charlus that we ought to style a Guermantes marked with a
blemish and expressing it to a certain extent by means of
traits peculiar to the Guermantes race, but the Duc de
Guermantes who would be in a perverted family the
exceptional example, whom the hereditary malady has so
effectively spared that the outward signs which it has left
upon him lose all their meaning. I remembered that on the
day when I had seen Saint-Loup for the first time at
Balbec, so fair complexioned, fashioned of so rare and
precious a substance, gliding between the tables, his
monocle fluttering in front of him, I had found in him an
effeminate air which was certainly not suggested by what I
was now learning about him, but sprang rather from the
grace peculiar to the Guermantes, from the fineness of that
Dresden china in which the Duchess too was moulded. I
recalled his affections for myself, his tender, sentimental
way of expressing it, and told myself that this also, which
might have deceived anyone else, meant at the time
something quite different, indeed the direct opposite of
what I had just learned about him. But from when did the
change date? If it had occurred before my return to Balbec,
how was it that he had never once come to see the lift-boy,
had never once mentioned him to me? And as for the first
year, how could he have paid any attention to the boy,
passionately enamoured as he then was of Rachel? That first
year, I had found Saint-Loup peculiar, as was every true
Guermantes. Now he was even more individual than I had
supposed. But things of which we have not had a direct
intuition, which we have learned only through other people,
we have no longer any opportunity, the time has passed in
which we could inform our heart of them; its communications
with reality are suspended; and so we cannot profit by the
discovery, it is too late. Besides, upon any consideration,
this discovery pained me too intensely for me to be able to
derive spiritual advantage from it. No doubt, after what M.
de Charlus had told me in Mme. Verdurin’s house — in Paris,
I no longer doubted that Robert’s case was that of any
number of respectable people, to be found even among the
best and most intelligent of men. To learn this of anyone
else would not have affected me, of anyone in the world
save Robert. The doubt that Aimé‘s words had left in my
mind tarnished all our friendship at Balbec and Doncières,
and albeit I did not believe in friendship, nor did I
believe that I had ever felt any real friendship for
Robert, when I thought about those stories of the lift-boy
and of the restaurant in which I had had luncheon with
Saint-Loup and Rachel, I was obliged to make an effort to
restrain my tears.

I should, as it happens, have no need to pause to
consider this visit which I paid to the Combray district,
which was perhaps the time in my life when I gave least
thought to Combray, had it not furnished what was at least
a provisional verification of certain ideas which I had
formed long ago of the ‘Guermantes way,’ and also a
verification of certain other ideas which I had formed of
the ‘Méséglise way.’ I repeated every evening, in the
opposite direction, the walks which we used to take at
Combray, in the afternoon, when we went the ‘Méséglise
way.’ We dined now at Tansonville at an hour at which in
the past I had long been asleep at Combray. And this on
account of the heat of the sun. And also because, as
Gilberte spent the afternoon painting in the chapel
attached to the house, we did not take our walks until
about two hours before dinner. For the pleasure of those
earlier walks which was that of seeing as we returned home
the purple sky frame the Calvary or mirror itself in the
Vivonne, there was substituted the pleasure of setting
forth when dusk had already gathered, when we encountered
nothing in the village save the blue-grey, irregular and
shifting triangle of a flock of sheep being driven home.
Over half the fields night had already fallen; above the
evening star the moon had already lighted her lamp which
presently would bathe their whole extent. It would happen
that Gilberte let me go without her, and I would move
forward, trailing my shadow behind me, like a boat that
glides across enchanted waters. But as a rule Gilberte came
with me. The walks that we took thus together were very
often those that I used to take as a child: how, then,
could I help feeling far more keenly now than in the past
on the ‘Guermantes way’ the conviction that I would never
be able to write anything, combined with the conviction
that my imagination and my sensibility had grown more
feeble, when I found how little interest I took in Combray?
And it distressed me to find how little I relived my early
years. I found the Vivonne a meagre, ugly rivulet beneath
its towpath. Not that I noticed any material discrepancies
of any magnitude from what I remembered. But, separated
from the places which I happened to be revisiting by the
whole expanse of a different life, there was not, between
them and myself, that contiguity from which is born, before
even we can perceive it, the immediate, delicious and total
deflagration of memory. Having no very clear conception,
probably, of its nature, I was saddened by the thought that
my faculty of feeling and imagining things must have
diminished since I no longer took any pleasure in these
walks. Gilberte herself, who understood me even less than I
understood myself, increased my melancholy by sharing my
astonishment. “What,” she would say, “you feel no
excitement when you turn into this little footpath which
you used to climb?” And she herself had so entirely altered
that I no longer thought her beautiful, which indeed she
had ceased to be. As we walked, I saw the landscape change,
we had to climb hillocks, then came to a downward slope. We
conversed, very pleasantly for me — not without difficulty
however. In so many people there are different strata which
are not alike (there were in her her father’s character,
and her mother’s); we traverse first one, then the other.
But, next day, their order is reversed. And finally we do
not know who is going to allot the parts, to whom we are to
appeal for a hearing. Gilberte was like one of those
countries with which we dare not form an alliance because
of their too frequent changes of government. But in reality
this is a mistake. The memory of the most constant
personality establishes a sort of identity in the person,
with the result that he would not fail to abide by promises
which he remembers even if he has not endorsed them. As for
intelligence, it was in Gilberte, with certain absurdities
that she had inherited from her mother, very keen. I
remember that, in the course of our conversations while we
took these walks, she said things which often surprised me
greatly. The first was: “If you were not too hungry and if
it was not so late, by taking this road to the left and
then turning to the right, in less than a quarter of an
hour we should be at Guermantes.” It was as though she had
said: “Turn to the left, then the first turning on the
right and you will touch the intangible, you will reach the
inaccessibly remote tracts of which we never upon earth
know anything but the direction, but” (what I thought long
ago to be all that I could ever know of Guermantes, and
perhaps in a sense I had not been mistaken) “the ‘way.’”
One of my other surprises was that of seeing the ‘source of
the Vivonne’ which I imagined as something as
extraterrestrial as the Gates of Hell, and which was merely
a sort of rectangular basin in which bubbles rose to the
surface. And the third occasion was when Gilberte said to
me: “If you like, we might go out one afternoon, and then
we can go to Guermantes, taking the road by Méséglise, it
is the nicest walk,” a sentence which upset all my childish
ideas by informing me that the two ‘ways’ were not as
irreconcilable as I had supposed. But what struck me most
forcibly was how little, during this visit, I lived over
again my childish years, how little I desired to see
Combray, how meagre and ugly I thought the Vivonne. But
where Gilberte made some of the things come true that I had
imagined about the Méséglise way was during one of those
walks which after all were nocturnal even if we took them
before dinner — for she dined so late. Before descending
into the mystery of a perfect and profound valley carpeted
with moonlight, we stopped for a moment, like two insects
about to plunge into the blue calyx of a flower. Gilberte
then uttered, perhaps simply out of the politeness of a
hostess who is sorry that you are going away so soon and
would have liked to shew you more of a country which you
seem to appreciate, a speech of the sort in which her
practice as a woman of the world skilled in putting to the
best advantage silence, simplicity, sobriety in the
expression of her feelings, makes you believe that you
occupy a place in her life which no one else could fill.
Showering abruptly over her the sentiment with which I was
filled by the delicious air, the breeze that was wafted to
my nostrils, I said to her: “You were speaking the other
day of the little footpath, how I loved you then!” She
replied: “Why didn’t you tell me? I had no idea of it. I
was in love with you. Indeed, I flung myself twice at your
head.” “When?” “The first time at Tansonville, you were
taking a walk with your family, I was on my way home, I had
never seen such a dear little boy. I was in the habit,” she
went on with a vague air of modesty, “of going out to play
with little boys I knew in the ruins of the keep of
Roussainville. And you will tell me that I was a very
naughty girl, for there were girls and boys there of all
sorts who took advantage of the darkness. The altar-boy
from Combray church, Théodore, who, I am bound to confess,
was very nice indeed (Heavens, how charming he was!) and
who has become quite ugly (he is the chemist now at
Méséglise), used to amuse himself with all the peasant
girls of the district. As they let me go out by myself,
whenever I was able to get away, I used to fly there. I
can’t tell you how I longed for you to come there too; I
remember quite well that, as I had only a moment in which
to make you understand what I wanted, at the risk of being
seen by your people and mine, I signalled to you so
vulgarly that I am ashamed of it to this day. But you
stared at me so crossly that I saw that you didn’t want
it.” And, all of a sudden, I said to myself that the true
Gilberte — the true Albertine — were perhaps those who had
at the first moment yielded themselves in their facial
expression, one behind the hedge of pink hawthorn, the
other upon the beach. And it was I who, having been
incapable of understanding this, having failed to recapture
the impression until much later in my memory after an
interval in which, as a result of our conversations, a
dividing hedge of sentiment had made them afraid to be as
frank as in the first moments — had ruined everything by my
clumsiness. I had lost them more completely — albeit, to
tell the truth, the comparative failure with them was less
absurd — for the same reasons that had made Saint-Loup lose
Rachel.

“And the second time,” Gilberte went on, “was years
later when I passed you in the doorway of your house, a
couple of days before I met you again at my aunt Oriane’s,
I didn’t recognise you at first, or rather I did
unconsciously recognise you because I felt the same longing
that I had felt at Tansonville.” “But between these two
occasions there were, after all, the Champs-Elysées.” “Yes,
but there you were too fond of me, I felt that you were
spying upon me all the time.” I did not ask her at the
moment who the young man was with whom she had been walking
along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, on the day on which I
had started out to call upon her, on which I would have
been reconciled with her while there was still time, that
day which would perhaps have changed the whole course of my
life, if I had not caught sight of those two shadowy forms
advancing towards me side by side in the dusk. If I had
asked her, I told myself, she would perhaps have confessed
the truth, as would Albertine had she been restored to
life. And indeed when we are no longer in love with women
whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of
death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they
were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no
longer in love makes the people that they were or the
person that we were then as good as dead? It occurred to me
that perhaps she might not have remembered, or that she
might have lied to me. In any case, it no longer interested
me in the least to know, since my heart had changed even
more than Gilberte’s face. This last gave me scarcely any
pleasure, but what was most striking was that I was no
longer wretched, I should have been incapable of
conceiving, had I thought about it again, that I could have
been made so wretched by the sight of Gilberte tripping
along by the side of a young man, and thereupon saying to
myself: “It is all over, I shall never attempt to see her
again.” Of the state of mind which, in that far off year,
had been simply an unending torture to me, nothing
survived. For there is in this world in which everything
wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles
into dust, that destroys itself still more completely,
leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty:
namely Grief.

And so I am not surprised that I did not ask her then
with whom she had been walking in the Champs-Elysées, for I
have already seen too many examples of this incuriosity
that is brought about by time, but I am a little surprised
that I did not tell Gilberte that, before I saw her that
evening, I had sold a bowl of old Chinese porcelain in
order to buy her flowers. It had indeed been, during the
dreary time that followed, my sole consolation to think
that one day I should be able without danger to tell her of
so delicate an intention. More than a year later, if I saw
another carriage bearing down upon mine, my sole reason for
wishing not to die was that I might be able to tell this to
Gilberte. I consoled myself with the thought: “There is no
hurry, I have a whole lifetime in which to tell her.” And
for this reason I was anxious not to lose my life. Now it
would have seemed to me a difficult thing to express in
words, almost ridiculous, and a thing that would ‘involve
consequences.’ “However,” Gilberte went on, “even on the
day when I passed you in the doorway, you were still just
the same as at Combray; if you only knew how little you
have altered!” I pictured Gilberte again in my memory. I
could have drawn the rectangle of light which the sun cast
beneath the hawthorns, the trowel which the little girl was
holding in her hand, the slow gaze that she fastened on
myself. Only I had supposed, because of the coarse gesture
that accompanied it, that it was a contemptuous gaze
because what I longed for it to mean seemed to me to be a
thing that little girls did not know about and did only in
my imagination, during my hours of solitary desire. Still
less could I have supposed that so easily, so rapidly,
almost under the eyes of my grandfather, one of them would
have had the audacity to suggest it.

Long after the time of this conversation, I asked
Gilberte with whom she had been walking along the Avenue
des Champs-Elysées on the evening on which I had sold the
bowl: it was Léa in male attire. Gilberte knew that she was
acquainted with Albertine, but could not tell me any more.
Thus it is that certain persons always reappear in our life
to herald our pleasures or our griefs.

What reality there had been beneath the appearance on
that occasion had become quite immaterial to me. And yet
for how many days and nights had I not tormented myself
with wondering who the man was, had I not been obliged,
when I thought of him, to control the beating of my heart
even more perhaps than in the effort not to go downstairs
to bid Mamma good-night in that same Combray. It is said,
and this is what accounts for the gradual disappearance of
certain nervous affections, that our nervous system grows
old. This is true not merely of our permanent self which
continues throughout the whole duration of our life, but of
all our successive selves which after all to a certain
extent compose the permanent self.

And so I was obliged, after an interval of so many
years, to add fresh touches to an image which I recalled so
well, an operation which made me quite happy by shewing me
that the impassable gulf which I had then supposed to exist
between myself and a certain type of little girl with
golden hair was as imaginary as Pascal’s gulf, and which I
felt to be poetic because of the long series of years at
the end of which I was called upon to perform it. I felt a
stab of desire and regret when I thought of the dungeons of
Roussainville. And yet I was glad to be able to say to
myself that the pleasure towards which I used to strain
every nerve in those days, and which nothing could restore
to me now, had indeed existed elsewhere than in my mind, in
reality, and so close at hand, in that Roussainville of
which I spoke so often, which I could see from the window
of the orris-scented closet. And I had known nothing! In
short Gilberte embodied everything that I had desired upon
my walks, even my inability to make up my mind to return
home, when I thought I could see the tree-trunks part
asunder, take human form. The things for which at that time
I so feverishly longed, she had been ready, if only I had
had the sense to understand and to meet her again, to let
me taste in my boyhood. More completely even than I had
supposed, Gilberte had been in those days truly part of the
‘Méséglise way.’

And indeed on the day when I had passed her in a
doorway, albeit she was not Mlle. de l’Orgeville, the girl
whom Robert had met in houses of assignation (and what an
absurd coincidence that it should have been to her future
husband that I had applied for information about her), I
had not been altogether mistaken as to the meaning of her
glance, nor as to the sort of woman that she was and
confessed to me now that she had been. “All that is a long
time ago,” she said to me, “I have never given a thought to
anyone but Robert since the day of our engagement. And, let
me tell you, that childish caprice is not the thing for
which I blame myself most.”

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